What follows is a YSlow based performance survey of 200 top web sites. The list was seeded seeded by the the Compete Attention 200, a list based on the amount of time people spend at certain sites- as opposed to page views, etc. It’s a little out of date, but it’s as good a list as any to choose from, so I went with it (especially since sites like many of these where people spend a lot of time and that serve a lot of big media would benefit from far futures expires headers, CDNs, etc.)
For the most part I just dropped the URL in and went to the home page once, recording the YSlow score I saw there. With sites that had country specific home pages and "choose your country" gatekeeper screens, I clicked through to the US home page.
Sites marked with an asterisk were bought/merged, etc. and no longer pointed to the original Compete Attention 200 URL. Blank YSlow grades mean I couldn’t get the report to actually run. All three sites simply hung up when the performance button was pressed.
Other than that? Read it and weep:
Continue reading “YSlow Performance Grades for 200 Top Web Sites”